How To Grow Your YouTube Business Channel – Tips & Ideas to Get You Started
June 12, 2023
YouTube is a dynamic and influential platform that has transformed the world of digital marketing. With billions of monthly active users, it presents an unparalleled opportunity for small businesses to expand their reach, engage with customers and drive business growth.
Not only does YouTube offer a creative medium to share your brand’s story, but it also serves as the second largest search engine, presenting an untapped potential to reach a wider audience through SEO strategies.
For small businesses, navigating the vast digital landscape can be challenging, but understanding and utilizing YouTube can be a game-changer.
This blog explores practical strategies to leverage YouTube effectively, offering tips to boost your visibility and increase your subscriber base. By focusing on reaching the right audience and providing value, small businesses can utilize YouTube as a powerful marketing channel.
Don’t aim for viral sensation, focus on the right audience
Let’s start with a clarification. The goal of your business YouTube videos is not to garner astronomical figures, such as 14 million views.
Why not? Because videos, like the “Condom Challenge,” where water-filled prophylactics are dropped on people’s heads in slow-motion, are the types of videos that reach those numbers.
If you happen to be an inventive, consistent gamer or a creative teen with a distinct cosmetic touch, you might attract a legion of followers. Or, if you have the budget to fund extreme adventure challenges, like Red Bull, you might get millions of subscribers.
It’s a win if you come up with truly out-of-the-box ideas, like blending an iPhone:
If you can reach these popular heights, more power to you. Your brand will become renowned. However, most businesses need to have more realistic expectations.
The content that is widely popular on YouTube ranges from quirky to weird, and it’s an ongoing effort to filter out the less desirable content that humanity wants to post.
For most businesses, the idea is not to reach the largest possible audience. It’s to reach the right audience.
For a business like a local restaurant, that audience may only be a few thousand people who regularly visit their establishment. A massage therapist in Portland might gain a subscriber in Miami, but it’s not going to result in a new client (at least not until they invent virtual massage).
So let’s move away from the realms of gamers, teen trends and sensational challenges. The real question is how you utilize YouTube to scale your business.
Leveraging YouTube’s search traffic
As Brandon says in the video, YouTube is a hub of internet traffic. It’s the second largest search engine to Google and gets more daily users than Facebook.
So with all that traffic, why are so few SMBs on YouTube?
Two main reasons come up.
The first is that most businesses overestimate the commitment required to create videos. They see video production as out of their reach, requiring equipment and expertise they lack.
But the truth is you can shoot amateur video on a phone and fit right in on YouTube. Major production resources are not a requirement, and in some cases, they are a disadvantage.
The second reason is more legitimate. To create a video, you need ideas that translate into the visual medium. You’ll have to outline a loose script to structure the video.
On YouTube, this idea (for business videos) will usually need to connect to an information gap your prospective customer has. The vast majority of successful SMB YouTube channels are informational, which includes product reviews.
While there are over a billion users on YouTube, they don’t do the same types of searches as they do on Google.
On Google, people look for businesses and products directly; their searches have transactional intent.
YouTube gets little in the way of transactional search. People go to YouTube to be entertained or to discover useful information.
Coming up with these types of video ideas is a challenge for most SMBs. Furthermore, there are many businesses that don’t lend themselves to creating videos.
If you’re a plumber, it’s not likely you’ll get leads by showing a water heater install. If you’re a dentist, you probably don’t want to film someone getting a root canal.
To build a YouTube channel that gains subscribers and get views organically, you have to create something people want to watch. You have to provide value.
That’s how Marketing 360® went from a handful of subscribers in 2015 to 45k today. It worked with informational videos like this, which has 600k views:
To reach your business goals, it’s really helpful when your business lends itself to informational videos.
For example, Appliance Parts Pros creates videos where they demonstrate DIY repair on home appliances – just the kind of thing people search for on YouTube.
The repairs require parts – which of course they sell. The videos have calls to action and links to buy the needed parts:
The individual videos usually only have a few hundred views, but the audience is super specific – and targeted.
As Brandon mentions in the video, be sure to target search keywords and optimize your video on the backend:
Many businesses do a poor job of optimizing for search on YouTube, so the searches tend to be less competitive.
If your business doesn’t lend itself to educational or entertaining videos, create a promotional spot and use paid advertising. Your audience is probably on YouTube, so it is – at the least – a great place to give your pitch.
Building a significant audience and getting a lot of video views on YouTube takes time. If you can provide value with videos, keep producing and posting them.
Eventually, your audience will find you, become subscribers, and learn the things about your products and brand that turn them into loyal customers.
Orignally published on 4/25/19
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